Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker

PROLOGUE

Saturday, May 21,1988

Inglewood, California

Graveside funerals dotted the rolling hills of the Inglewood Park Cemetery, in a residential black neighborhood on the outskirts of L.A. White canopies shielded mourners from the sun, but couldn’t block out the rumble of planes, which zoomed in and out of the nearby Los Angeles International Airport. Throughout the cemetery, the foul smell of jet fumes hid the scent of freshly cut grass.

Two days earlier, a passenger flight from the Netherlands had carried the badly decomposed body of a trumpeter recalled as one of the handsomest men of the 1950s. Chet Baker had died a mysterious, drug-related death in Amsterdam on Friday the thirteenth. Now, after years in Europe, he was back in Southern California, where he had first known glory, to be laid to rest alongside his father. A former Oklahoma farmboy, Baker had filled people’s heads with fantasies from the time he was born. Everything about him was open to speculation: his cool trumpet playing, so vulnerable yet so detached; his enigmatic half-smile; the androgyny of his sweet singing voice; a face both childlike and sinister. The melody that poured from his horn had led Baker’s Italian fans to dub him l’angelo (the angel) and tromba d’oro (the golden trumpet). Marc Danval, a writer from Belgium, called his music one of the most beautiful cries of the twentieth century and compared him to Baudelaire, Rilke, and Edgar Allan Poe. In Europe, even his longtime addiction to heroin worked in his favor, making him seem all the more fragile and precious.

But in America, his death didn’t arouse much sympathy. Baker’s New York Times obituary, which listed the wrong age (fifty-nine instead of fifty-eight), portrayed him as a faded heartthrob whose phenomenal luck had turned sour due to drugs. Some critics said he might have been overrated at the beginning, the paper noted of a musician once proclaimed the Great White Hope of jazz trumpeters. Despite announcements in the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter, only about thirty-five people showed up at the funeral. It was sad, it was not a celebration, said clarinetist Bernie Fleischer, Baker’s high-school bandmate. But nobody expected him to last this long anyway.

Few of those gathered knew much about his life abroad, and now, as they stared at a closed coffin, they were even more puzzled by his death. At about 3:10 in the morning, Dutch police had removed his body from a sidewalk below the window of his third-floor hotel room near Amsterdam’s Central Station. Steps away was Zeedijk, a winding side street notorious for the most blatant drug dealing in Holland. Officers dumped the anonymous corpse at the morgue, assuming they had found one more unlucky dope fiend. The next day, Peter Huijts, Baker’s Dutch road manager, identified the body. The death was ruled either a suicide or a drug-induced accident.

But contradictory evidence abounded. The window of his hotel room opened only about twelve inches, making it impossible for him to have fallen out involuntarily. Drug paraphernalia was found all over the room, yet a police spokesperson announced that Baker’s blood showed no sign of heroin. In recent months, Baker had told several people that someone was out to get him. His English widow, Carol, living in Oklahoma with their three children, seized upon the same notion. It wasn’t suicide; it was foul play, she insisted. Pianist Frank Strazzeri, who had played for Baker not long before, took her suspicion a step further: I’m looking down at the coffin and I’m saying, ‘What the hell happened, man? What did you do? You fool, man, you burned another cat for bread. They finally killed you.’

It was just like Baker to keep everybody guessing, even in death. He was a man of so few words, and notes, that each one seemed mysterious and profound. British writer Colin Butler had noted a similar quality in Jeri Southern, a melancholy singer-pianist of the fifties whose neuroses had led to a nervous breakdown and a refusal to sing again. It was as though she had looked into the heart of some American dream and seen the outlines of a nightmare that was never ever to be discussed, Butler wrote. Baker had lived inside some unnamed torment of his own, and drawn from it such lusciously sad, lyrical music that people clung to him for years, determined to uncover his secret. To Hiro Kawashima, a young Japanese trumpeter, Baker was like Buddha: He taught me about life itself, and I look up to him as the ‘master of life,’ so to speak. Singer Ruth Young, Baker’s girlfriend of ten years, was so entranced by her Picasso, as she called him, that she smuggled dope across borders for him and once even helped him drag a dead body out of a European apartment and dispose of it.

Baker had unleashed a similar mania in photographer Bruce Weber, who had paid for his funeral. From 1986 through 1989, Weber had reportedly spent a million dollars of his own money to make the documentary Let’s Get Lost, an orgasmic fantasia about a man whose fifties look had helped inspire Weber’s homoerotic ads for Calvin Klein underwear. His camera lingered just as rapturously on the Baker of the late eighties, a figure whom film critics called a singing corpse (J. Hoberman, the Village Voice), a withered goat (Julie Salamon, the Wall Street Journal), a hollow-cheeked, toothless, mumbling, all but brain-dead relic (Charles Champlin, the Los Angeles Times), an unreliable, conniving heroin addict (Lee Jeske, the New York Post), a bloodsucker and drug-ravaged ghost (Chip Stern, Rolling Stone). All this of a man whose solos were regarded as models of heartfelt expression, as graceful as poems.

Each person at the funeral had his own fascination with Baker. At around 2 p.m., mourners started drifting into the cemetery. They passed the coffin, which was placed on a gurney beside the grave, and sat in a cluster of folding chairs. Everything had been planned by Emie Amemiya, the young woman who had coordinated the shooting of Let’s Get Lost. There in the cemetery, Amemiya saw, for the first and only time, the trumpeter’s second wife, Halema Alli, who had refused to participate in the film. In 1956, Alli had posed shyly with a bare-chested Baker for a coolly erotic portrait by photographer William Claxton. Four years later, she wound up in an Italian jail, howling in anguish while awaiting trial as an accomplice in her husband’s biggest drug bust. Diane Vavra, Baker’s lover for years, attended the funeral but stayed at the back of the crowd, as far as possible from the front row, where Carol, the three children, and Baker’s mother, Vera, were seated. Baker and Vavra’s mutual obsession had raged so intensely that she called it a sickness. The trumpeter couldn’t live without her, yet his abuse had finally made her run for her life the previous February.

Only now was it safe to return, or so she had thought. Even before the service began, Baker seemed to be present, stirring up the same jealousy and paranoia he had aroused in life. Baker’s daughter, Melissa, began taunting Vavra in her hillbilly twang: We don’t like you! We don’t want you here! We want you to leave! Vavra recalled seeing a really evil smile cross Carol’s face with every harangue. Many wondered why Carol had stayed with Baker for twenty-eight years, given his continual absence, violence, overt relationships with other women, and financial neglect. She loved him, she explained. Years after his death, royalties from his CD reissues earned her more money than he himself had ever made from his albums. Yet she kept offering Chet Baker T-shirts, homemade CDs, and photos on the family Web site, seemingly determined to earn every cent, and more, of the cash he had denied her.

Melissa’s outbursts shook Ed Hancock, a boyhood acquaintance of Baker’s. He walked up to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and said, Not now! Amemiya motioned nervously for the eulogies to start. Bernie Fleischer reminisced about the teenage Baker: I just couldn’t believe the way he played! Everything was such a struggle for me, and it was so easy for him, like a bird singing. Peter Huijts quoted some words allegedly spoken to Dizzy Gillespie by Charlie Parker, the father of bebop, who had used Baker in his band in 1952: You better look out, there’s a little white cat who’s gonna eat you up! There were tributes from bassist Hersh Hamel, another early pal of Baker’s; Russ Freeman, who played piano in his famous quartet of the midfifties; and Frank Strazzeri, his accompanist in Let’s Get Lost. Then Chris Tedesco, a young West Coast trumpeter who worshipped Baker, stepped forward. Holding back tears, he played an unaccompanied version of My Funny Valentine, Baker’s theme. When he cracked a note—just as Baker had on his first recording of the song in 1952—Fleischer felt a chill, as if his old friend were truly haunting the proceedings.

Amemiya witnessed an even stranger moment. She had brought a huge bouquet of white roses to distribute among the guests, and had placed the vase on the ground in front of Carol and Melissa. What happened couldn’t be blamed on the sun, which was bright but not blazing. Suddenly the vase shattered, Amemiya said, strewing flowers and broken glass at their feet.

As the funeral ended, Melissa placed a rose on her father’s coffin, then joined the other attendees as they filed out. Diane Vavra trailed behind. Melissa turned around and hissed: I’d kick your ass right now but I’m not dressed for it! Years later, Vavra tried to be philosophical about that awful day. Well, she’s just a little kid, she said of Melissa, who was nearly twenty-two when Baker died. Her father didn’t treat her very well. Never was around.

Tedesco was one of the last to leave the gravesite. He stopped at the coffin, which was still aboveground, and laid a note, handwritten on musical staff paper, atop the lid: Dear Chet, you were the first jazz trumpet player that I ever heard and studied. You touched my life so many times with your solos and your singing. Farewell.

Whatever horrors they may have faced in their pursuit of Chet Baker, most of the mourners shared Tedesco’s sentiment. After all is said and done, felt Amemiya, Chettie was so gifted and so magical that what he gave out he could never, ever get back. But Gudrun Endress, a German broadcaster and publisher who had known Baker for years, saw things less romantically. Chet can hurt people even after he’s dead, she warned. Remember that.

1

The Christmas season of 1929 arrived just weeks after the stock market had crashed. But that December, nineteen-year-old Vera Baker got the gift of her dreams. In her little Oklahoma house, she gazed down at the infant in her arms, an angel with alabaster skin and hazel eyes. When he smiled at her, she saw magic. The child would surely lift her above the cold realities of marriage to a frequently unemployed alcoholic; more than that, he would bring meaning to her life, supplying all the tenderness and excitement that were missing. He was named Chesney, after his father. But with his chubby cheeks and dark hair, the child seemed like a tiny replica of herself. From the time of his birth, Chettie, as she called him, was the center of Vera’s universe.

Her obsession with him, and his father’s response to it, had a darker effect on Chet Baker than he ever acknowledged; even he probably didn’t understand it. Years later, he told Lisa Galt Bond, his collaborator on an unfinished memoir, I had a very happy childhood; no problems. The tendency to keep things hidden had been ingrained in him from an early age. In 1954 he brought his French girlfriend, Liliane Cukier, to his parents’ home during the first national tour of the Chet Baker Quartet. She observed the Bakers for three weeks. This was a family where nobody hollered, didn’t say what they had in their hearts or in their minds, she noticed. Everyone was just trying to be cool.

Cukier recalled Chesney and Vera as Oklahoma peasants, ordinary white people from way in the center. Starting in 1946, Chesney drove a yellow cab, the only job he had held on to for more than a couple of years. For a while in the twenties, he had lived his dream by touring as a guitar and banjo player. He worked mainly in hillbilly bands, but according to his son, Chesney had a feeling for jazz: he could whistle the licks of his hero, the Texas-born trombone master Jack Teagarden, while improvising on guitar.

Then came the Depression and the birth of his child, and he was forced to quit music and take a series of dreary survival jobs. He rarely mentioned his frustration, but it showed on his face: by his thirties he looked old and haggard, with crow’s-feet spreading down his cheeks, pointing to a mouth that rarely smiled. He kept his sandy hair combed back, exposing a deeply furrowed brow. That prematurely ravaged look was inherited by his son, whose facial decay in later years would be commonly blamed on drug abuse. Chesney, though, aged far less strikingly. Bernie Fleischer recalled him as very bland-looking, a man who faded into the background: He was one of those shadowy figures who was always away somewhere. In the forties, Chesney surfaced occasionally to brag to his son’s musician friends about a night when the great Teagarden had come to the house to jam with him. Some of them would later suspect that the fabled meeting had never happened at all.

Liquor helped Chesney dull the truth, including memories of a grim childhood. His family had moved from Illinois, where he was born on January 24, 1906, to Snyder, Oklahoma. Life in Snyder seemed cursed—not just by the tornado and fires that had plagued the small town, but by domestic strife. Vera later explained that Chesney’s father, George Baker, had deserted his mother, Alice, and their five children for another woman. Alice went on to marry Grandpa Beardsley, as the family knew him, a farmer with a bad leg and a nasty temper. Grandpa Beardsley seemed to hate his stepson on sight; Chesney told Vera that the older man beat him with his cane and badgered him to leave the house and never come back. Alice tried to protect her son, but Chesney fled before he was eighteen. For the rest of his life he hated his father and stepfather. Even after the latter had suffered a stroke and needed two canes to walk, Chesney had no sympathy; he grumbled to Vera that he wouldn’t cross the street to see his stepfather even if the old man were on his deathbed.

It was in his teens that Chesney first found solace in the infant art of jazz. An improvisational music born of gospel, Negro spirituals, blues, and ragtime, jazz was all about letting the imagination take wing, molding split-second flights of fancy into personal statements of the heart. Chesney needed escape, and jazz seemed like the perfect vehicle. Besides Teagarden, whose ability to play trombone with endless invention defined the form, one other star fascinated Chesney: Bix Beiderbecke, a cornetist with a rich tone, spare delivery, and a poignance seldom found in early jazz, which tended to sound like party music.

Chesney taught himself to play banjo, a popular instrument in traditional jazz, and thus wrote his own ticket out of Snyder. The still-tiny jazz circuit seemed out of his reach, so he joined a series of country-western bands that entertained at dances throughout Oklahoma and other Midwestern states. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but never had he known such joy: he lived each day for music, then unwound at night by drinking and smoking reefer, just like his heroes.

In 1928, Chesney passed through Yale, Oklahoma, a small oil town between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Yale was so marginal that, in years to come, many state history books failed to mention it. The city’s only famous son was Jim Thorpe, the American Indian whose 1912 Olympic triumphs in football and track had won him the title World’s Greatest Athlete and inspired a Hollywood movie, Jim Thorpe: All American, starring Burt Lancaster. During the twenties, most of Yale’s 2,600 other residents worked in the town’s oil fields and refineries or as farmers.

One of the latter was Salomon Wesley Moser, a native of Iowa. In 1889, he had joined the legendary Oklahoma Run, in which white settlers charged in on horseback to drive Indians off the fertile land and claim it for themselves. Moser took eighty acres and started a farm. Around that time he met and married Randi, a young blind woman from Norway. The couple had seven children, who tended the farm. The next-to-youngest, Vera Pauline, was born there in May 1910. Vera grew into an unglamorous teenager. Short and stocky, she wore her mousy brown hair hanging down and parted in the middle. Her deep-set eyes were surrounded by little lines, deepened through years of exposure to the Oklahoma sun and dry winds.

At eighteen, Vera went to a Saturday-night barn dance where the young men and women of Yale gathered to find mates. She and the visiting guitar player, Chesney Baker, caught each other’s eye. He was such a handsome fellow! Vera recalled. After a brief courtship they were wed by a justice of the peace, and found a cozy house at 326 South B Street in Yale. But any dreams Vera may have had for marital bliss crumbled when Chesney skipped the honeymoon to go on tour, leaving her in Yale. Rather than live alone, she went back to her parents’ farm, where she waited almost a year for her husband to return.

Their estrangement ended abruptly in October 1929, when the stock market crash wiped out people’s entertainment budgets, along with Chesney’s modest career. Just before Christmas he came home, broke and bereft of prospects, to find his wife seven months pregnant, which only compounded his worries. On Monday, December 23, Vera gave birth to Chesney Henry Baker, Jr. Suddenly the letdowns of her marriage didn’t seem to matter. Vera refashioned her life around Chettie. She bought a Brownie box camera and began obsessively photographing her beautiful son—one way she could possess his every move. She documented his infancy in a photo album called The Dear Baby. Under the heading Baby’s Most Cherished Playthings, she noted the odd combination of a doll and a Tinkertoy car, a portent of the sexual ambiguity for which he eventually became known. When Chettie murmured I ov u, she wrote it neatly under Some of Baby’s First Sayings.

Vera’s infatuation with her newborn son couldn’t erase her fear of a bleak future. She fretted over how they would survive with no income. When Chesney finally found work, it was bitterly removed from the guitar-strumming he loved: he smashed up old boilers with a sledgehammer in an oil field for twenty-five cents an hour. But even that job vanished as the Yale refineries fell victim one by one to the Depression. Life there seemed hopeless, and when Chettie was about a year old, his parents took him and headed for Oklahoma City, the state capital. Purely by chance, the town had escaped the worst effects of the crash: just months before, an oil well had been drilled there, setting off a thriving petroleum industry. Several public-works projects were launched, and out of them came the Oklahoma Arts Center and the Oklahoma City Symphony. All this cultural activity made Chesney think he might be able to play again.

He and Vera rented a small house downtown, on a street lined with shops and factories. Compared with Yale, Oklahoma City felt like a big-time metropolis. Pedestrians stared up in awe at the state’s first skyscraper, twelve stories high; they streamed in and out of the First National Bank building, the Biltmore Hotel, the YWCA, and other modern structures. Steam trains puffed white clouds as they chugged along the Rock Island and Frisco railroad lines, which ran through the center of town. The city’s sparkle filled the Bakers with hope. Vera found a job in an ice-cream factory, while Chesney joined a band at radio station WKY, opening the broadcast day at 6 a.m. with a half-hour of hillbilly music. Fiddle players, a drummer, and guitarist Chesney huddled around a stand-up microphone in blue jeans and vests, stomping out a backbeat with their cowboy boots as they played. Often Chesney brought his son, then looked after him at home until Vera returned, bearing quarts of ice cream. On weekends, the band gathered at the house and jammed all night. For Chesney, life was complete again.

According to Vera, jazz and swing played on the radio for just an hour a day. During that time, she said in Let’s Get Lost, Chettie would climb onto a stool and listen with the burning concentration that one day would mark his playing. Sometimes she romanticized the memory by claiming that her two-year-old son used to jump off the chair and play songs on the trumpet; in fact, he didn’t touch a horn for another decade. But he was already absorbing the music, and in 1980 he told Lisa Galt Bond that he learned his first tune, Sleepytime Gal, from his father before he was two.

As he also revealed, music wasn’t the only thing Chesney exposed him to. In a 1960s tabloid article, The Trumpet and the Spike: A Confession by Chet Baker, he recalled lying in bed late one night and hearing his father gab with his buddies from behind the closed door of the living room. Curious, the child toddled over and peeked through the keyhole. His description of the event bordered on the surreal. My old man and his pals were lying back in their chairs with their eyes closed, he said. They’ve gone to sleep, I thought, and they’re dreaming strange, wonderful dreams. The room was filled with white smoke and its pungent smell reached me through the door and made me feel sick. One man, he recalled, wasn’t smoking; instead he sat with his mouth wide open, inhaling smoke from the air. They were almost in ecstasy, Baker said. I didn’t say anything to my father, nor to my mother, feeling that those gatherings were something secret, forbidden. After that first evening I spied a lot of other times on my father and his friends from the keyhole, more and more impressed and frightened.

Once he became known as a junkie, rumors spread that Baker used to smoke pot with his parents. I don’t know how that story got invented and circulated, he declared angrily to journalist Jerome Reece in 1983, after years of turning his life into a fantasy for reporters. My father would smoke with other musicians a few times a week at the house, but I was very young at the time. What a ridiculous story—my mother was very strict and she was against all that.

For the rest of his life, Baker defended his father stubbornly, even though he had reason not to. Their relationship took a harsh turn when Chesney lost his radio job. He never played professionally again. A failure as a musician and, increasingly, as a breadwinner, he started drinking heavily. Chesney sat around the house with the radio on, hearing others play the music he no longer performed; his frustration festered until it exploded. His son was usually the target. Chesney started raising his hand or belt to Chettie anytime the boy made too much noise or wouldn’t finish his dinner. His father used to beat the shit out of him, said Sandy Jones, a woman with whom the trumpeter shared heroin, sex, and some rare revelations in 1970.

Baker seldom mentioned those childhood beatings to anyone. Even Ruth Young, who drew the deepest confidences out of him, knew only the outlines of his early paternal relationship. Chet always wanted to be close to the father, but he was afraid of him, she said, adding: They were divided by the mother’s rein. Until Chesney died in 1967, Baker longed for his father’s approval; with his own career seemingly finished by that time, he empathized all the more with the older man’s pain at having to give up music.

Diane Vavra got an insight into Chesney’s violence in 1986, when Baker took her on a visit to Oklahoma to see his mother. In a moment alone with Vera, Diane confided that Baker had been beating her. Vera was sympathetic. My dear, why would you stay with a man who hit you? she asked. Let me tell you a story. She went on to recall a day early in her marriage when she and Chesney were in the car, with him at the wheel. He started accusing her of flirting with another man, and worked himself into a fury. The angrier he got, the more wildly he drove, until he made a bad turn and flipped the car over on its side. After that, said Vera, I never felt the same way about him again.

Vera couldn’t have imagined that this abusive streak, passed down from Grandpa Beardsley to her husband, would appear in her son as well, but eventually she found out firsthand. Vavra remembered hearing Baker snarl to her in the early seventies that he had just hit his own mother. That admission was echoed chillingly in Vera’s comment, made in Let’s Get Lost, that Chettie was exactly like his father.

Even in hard times, Vera kept up appearances. Despite her new full-time job as a saleslady at F. W. Woolworth, she maintained an immaculate, well-ordered home. To her son’s friends she seemed ever calm and maternal, with a doting smile. Nearly everyone described her as sweet, although when Bernie Fleischer met her in the forties, he saw a very used, washed-out, thin little lady.

Her little boy remained her salvation. Every morning before he left for kindergarten and she for work, she dressed him fussily in clothes she had bought with her employee discount, including a sailor suit with a big white pointed collar. She made him stand still as she plastered his hair back and tied his shoelaces. Small for his age, he resembled a little doll as he walked to school along the railroad tracks.

Photos kept filling up the family albums: Chettie on his bicycle, Chettie playing ball, Chettie with his dog, Chettie in the backyard or on the porch. By seven or eight he was an eminently handsome child: his baby fat gone, he revealed high cheekbones, flawless skin, and thick, dark blond hair. Already, he knew how to pose for the camera: which way to turn to catch the light in the most striking fashion, how to hold his body in a relaxed yet controlled way. Photographed on his bicycle, Baker looked strong and confident—shoulders back, eyes focused coolly into the distance. Even when he stared straight at the camera, the boy seemed detached, unattainable.

Vera reminded him constantly of his appeal. Some thought it odd that she had only one child, for in that age of primitive birth control, many wives stayed serially pregnant for years. But given her frosty relationship with her husband, their sex life had probably dwindled; in any case, Vera smilingly explained that Chettie was enough. She had no doubt that he favored her over his father. I think he was closer to me, she declared in Let’s Get Lost. As an adult, Baker remembered how uncomfortable he had felt when Vera put her arms around him and told him he had to stick by her forever: ‘Yes, mother, I will always stay near you,’ I answered. Now I understand her. I represented for her, in so much poverty and pain, the only reason for living. But Vera seemed oblivious to the fact that her fixation on Chettie was driving a growing wedge between herself and her husband, that her son would come to hate her smothering, and that she was nurturing in him a lifelong pattern of narcissism and self-involvement.

For now, she had more urgent concerns. The family was struggling to survive on her small salary and Chesney’s sporadic paychecks; so his sister, Agnes, and her husband, Jim, invited the Bakers to move into a spare room in their house on the fringe of Oklahoma City. Chettie later called his aunt and uncle the kindest people he had ever known. As a soldier stationed in Belgium during World War I, Jim had suffered permanent lung damage from inhaling mustard gas dropped by the Germans. He needed fresh air, and through the WPA he found work as a gardener and caretaker with the Oklahoma parks department. His wartime ordeal had also left him sterile, so the childless couple were thrilled to help raise such a handsome, polite, energetic boy as Chettie.

The WPA hired Chesney as a timekeeper, which involved clocking manhours on work sites for payroll purposes. The Depression was hardly over—Chettie heard Jim talk about people coming to the parks and eating grass and leaves off trees—but with three employed adults in the house, the family was spared its worst effects. Still, with Chesney, Vera, and Chettie crammed into one bedroom, life grew so claustrophobic that the boy was sent to the Moser farm in Yale for several summers. Vera usually joined him at some point, pleased, no doubt, to spend time away from Chesney and alone with her son. Sixty years later, she recalled her pride at watching him roam through the big red barn filled with horses and pigs, climb peach trees, wander along a stream on the property, and play in the watermelon fields. How that boy could run! she marveled. Oh, I couldn’t keep up with him!

But he also showed a tendency to withdraw—especially when his father began sending him to Snyder in the summertime. Given Chesney’s hatred of his stepfather, it seemed cruel of him to expose his son—maybe on purpose—to the old man’s tyranny. By now a stroke had nearly crippled Grandpa Beardsley, leaving him no patience for a rambunctious little boy. Chettie stayed outdoors as much as possible, scampering on a hillside chasing lizards.

Back in Oklahoma to resume grade school, Chettie was confronted anew with his parents’ strained relationship. Night after night he watched his father come home drunk, then launch into dreadful quarrels with Vera; increasingly the boy couldn’t stand being home. Chesney had often played guitar around the house for pleasure, but now the instrument lay untouched. He would never admit he was a failure as a musician, and always blamed the 1929 Depression, said Baker in a rare moment of candor about his father. With the romance between Chesney and Vera long dead, their son developed a distorted notion of what men and women could mean to each other, especially physically.

He became even more confused in 1939, when the family left Agnes and Jim and moved into an apartment over a restaurant in the heart of Oklahoma City. Years later, he told Lisa Galt Bond about an incident that unnerved him deeply. One Saturday afternoon as he stood on the back porch, nine-year-old Chettie heard moaning sounds below. Curious, he hung from the railing and peered through a crack in the restaurant wall. He spied a naked woman spread-eagled on a table with one of the two young restaurant owners on top of her. The child stared, bewildered, as the man ground against his partner furiously until he went limp. Lifting himself up, he wiped his and her genitals with tissues. At that moment, Chettie lost hold of the railing and fell several feet with a crash. Heart pounding, he ran and hid in a vacant lot until it was safe to go home.

Baker recalled that early vision of sex with a mixture of prurience and distaste, and it left its mark on him. Far into his adult life, he made love as roughly and mechanically as the man in the restaurant. It was a dismaying counterpart to the sensitive ballads he sang.

Chesney Sr. had lost all sense of romance, if he’d ever had any. His life was a failure in most regards, and soon after moving to Oklahoma City, he was out of work again. He responded by doing what his son would do whenever the pressure got too intense: he hopped in his car and fled. Leaving his family in Oklahoma, Chesney drove and drove. This time he never came back. He ended up in Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb in the southeastern tip of the San Fernando Valley. Chesney landed a job at Lockheed, a huge manufacturer of jet components, as a parts inspector. He rented a small house, where he lived alone for months before sending for his family.

In 1940, Vera and Chettie embarked on a 1,428-mile bus trip that lasted nearly two days. They took a direct ride on the Main Street of America: Route 66, the highway that spans the whole United States. As a hotshot jazz star, Baker would drive that road hundreds of times. Bobby Troup, a West Coast Jazz pianist and songwriter, made it seem like a hipster’s paradise when he wrote the 1946 hit (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66. Years before Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Troup extolled the wonders that might occur when a free spirit hit the open road.

As the bus sped west along Route 66, mother and son moved through the pastures and prairies of Texas, breathed the arid desert air of New Mexico and Arizona. Towns Vera had barely heard of whizzed by: Amarillo, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Needles. Finally they reached Glendale. Chettie stared out the window at vineyards and orange groves; at the woodsy hills and blue-tinged mountains that surrounded the city on three sides; at the glistening concrete sidewalks and sunny streets lined with eucalyptus, palm, and pepper trees. Relaxation was in the air, mingled with the fragrances of flowering greenery. After the turmoil of Oklahoma, he and Vera thought they had found heaven.

The new family home stood in a quiet, residential neighborhood surrounded by hills and canyons. Each day Chesney drove to Lockheed in his newly acquired 1936 Buick, while Vera rode the bus to the downtown L.A. branch of W. T. Grant, the five-and-dime where she now worked. Vera was a model of motherly efficiency on the sales floor, her hair now cropped short and pushed back, a cardigan draped around her shoulders. She beamed when anyone asked about her son, who seemed like a dream child: his grades were good, he didn’t make trouble, and the teachers liked him. In the move from Oklahoma to California, Chettie even jumped a term ahead.

But he wished he hadn’t. Still small, he looked even more undergrown among his older classmates. They started making fun of him, which stirred up an anger he had never shown before. The humiliation drove Chettie to prove he was faster and better than any of them. He raced to school on roller skates, then went after class to the YMCA, where sports became his passion. Whether in swimming, basketball, or track, he met every physical challenge without trying. Trumpeter Jack Sheldon, who became his friend later in the forties, was awestruck by Baker’s stamina. Sheldon was a superb athlete, especially in swimming and diving, but he could hardly keep up with Baker. He was so very special, Sheldon said. I remember we played tennis once. I was real good at tennis. He’d never played before, he told me, and I just barely beat him.

Chettie’s prowess didn’t end with sports. Since learning Sleepytime Gal as a child, he hadn’t pursued music much, but when he found an old upright in the basement of the Y, he began pecking out tunes by ear. At home, he sang along with the radio. His voice had yet to change, and it sounded as high and neutered as a choirboy’s. Vera found it irresistible, and it gave her one more excuse to show him off. In 1942, she started to drag him (as he later put it) to Clifton’s, a popular restaurant near W. T. Grant’s that held kiddie talent shows. Competing against fledgling accordionists, tap dancers, and yodelers—all towed by their own fawning mothers—twelve-year-old Chettie crooned some rather mature love songs. Vera had taught him her favorite tunes from the Hit Parade: Cole Porter’s seductive You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To; I Had the Craziest Dream, a woman’s plea for a princely lover, made famous by singer Helen Forrest with Harry James’s orchestra; and That Old Black Magic, a hit about the tingle of sexual attraction, popularized by the teenage singer Margaret Whiting. Maybe some kind of Oedipus thing was going on, said Diane Vavra, because his mother taught him all these very erotic lyrics. Baker looked slight and fey as he sang them; years later, he confided to pianist Jimmy Rowles that some of the children had laughed at him, calling him sissy and saying he sounded like a girl. The taunts infuriated him, but typically, Vera romanticized those contests by claiming that Chettie had always won first place. Baker said he never did, although he came in second once to a little ballerina who did a split.

Having a pretty son with a feminine singing voice wasn’t too pleasing to Chesney, and he took steps to recast the boy in a manly image. In 1943, he stopped at a pawnshop on his way home from the factory. With Jack Tea-garden in mind, he bought a trombone and gave it to his son. It was an insensitive choice: with the slide extended, the horn was almost as long as Chettie, who couldn’t possibly manipulate it. Begrudgingly, Chesney exchanged it for a trumpet. He brought it home and coldly set it down, not even handing it to the boy. For the rest of her life, Vera claimed that it took her son only two weeks to learn how to play along with Harry James’s lightning-fast solo on Two O’Clock Jump. Most musicians learn their craft through a combination of practice and study of the intricacies of technique and theory, but that wasn’t Chet Baker’s approach to music or to life. You gotta realize, Chet was not that intelligent, said Ruth Young. "He did not know what he was doing, on that level, ever. He just did it."

No sooner had he shown all this musical promise than disaster struck. As he played in the street after school with his neighborhood pals, one of them threw a rock at a lamppost. It ricocheted and hit Chettie in the mouth, breaking off his left front tooth. Chesney flew into a rage, shouting that the boy would never be able to play his horn again. Chettie couldn’t understand the fuss; he didn’t know it was almost impossible to control the flow of air into a wind instrument with a missing front tooth. He practiced with such tenacity that he made the dental gap a part of his technique. The lost tooth limited his range, but he didn’t care; high notes were just for showing off, he decided, and once he reached twenty he wasn’t interested in that. Vera took him to the dentist and got him a removable tooth, but he seldom wore it. Instead, he hid the space by keeping his lips closed in public, creating the Mona Lisa half-smile that made him look inscrutable.

At Glendale Junior High, the teenager signed up for a basic instrumental training course, but it bored him. He mastered each exercise in moments, and had no patience for studying a textbook. It struck him as a waste of time to memorize dots and curly lines on staff paper; why bother when he could pick up a song by hearing it once or twice? Playing in the school dance band, he learned the Sousa marches by ear, then pretended to read the scores. At home, he absorbed the pop tunes of the day from radio or from Vera’s 7.s. His favorite musician was trumpeter Harry James, whose orchestra had zoomed to the top of the charts with a sentimental old ballad from 1913, You Made Me Love You. James played with a honey-dripping tone, decorating songs with a frilliness that most of the budding beboppers found corny. But Baker loved James’s big, bright sound, and studied the bandleader’s solos until he could copy them almost exactly.

With James’s outpourings of romance fresh in his mind, Baker lost his virginity at fifteen. The experience, as he described it to Lisa Galt Bond, was even tawdrier than his voyeuristic glimpse of sex in Oklahoma City. Baker had made friends with Bennett and Leo Little, two brothers who lived with their mother in a residential hotel in downtown Glendale. According to Baker, Mrs. Little’s full-time job at Thrifty Drugs left her sons to their own devices after school, and the boys divided their free time between a tree house and a pit they had dug behind the hotel. Baker remembered vanishing with them into one place or the other and talking naïvely about how it would feel to have sex with a girl.

They soon found out. Baker knocked on their apartment door one day, he said, to find Leo and Bennett inside with a fifteen-year-old girl named Barbara. She announced her willingness to take on all three boys. Afraid that Mrs. Little would come home and catch them, Baker and the brothers took Barbara out to the tree house, which was hidden behind two adjoining signboards. As she lay on her back, Baker—the best-looking boy—went first. Barbara was obviously no virgin. Naked beneath her dress, she lifted the hem and guided him inside her as Leo and Bennett watched. Baker was so overwhelmed that he climaxed in seconds, then stumbled dizzily to his feet as the brothers laughed. Instead of exhilaration, he felt nauseated and shaken, and ran out the door thinking, Never again, never again. The recollection—apocryphal though it may be—so traumatized Baker, he claimed, that for a time he didn’t want to go near another girl. In 1980, he described that initiation into lovemaking as my first pussy, a phrase that reflected his general attitude toward sex.

The end of World War II in August 1945 brought an economic boom and a rush of job opportunities for returning servicemen, but not for Chesney Baker. After coming to blows with his boss at Lockheed, he once more found himself out of a job. Now almost forty, he was far less employable than the young ex-GIs, especially with a work history that marked him as trouble. In the months he spent searching fruitlessly for a job, Vera’s dime-store salary was stretched to the limit.

The Bakers were rescued by two old friends from Oklahoma, Bob and Tillie Coulter. They let the family move into their house in Hermosa Beach, California, a seaside town bordering the larger community of Redondo Beach. In a replay of their experience with Jim and Agnes, the Bakers uprooted themselves and took over a spare room at the Coulters’. With her spotless employment record, Vera obtained a transfer to the W. T. Grant’s store in nearby Inglewood. With no other options, Chesney started driving a cab.

The bedroom in the Coulter house became a pressure cooker. Thrown into such close quarters with her sullen, brooding husband, Vera grew even more obsessed with her son, who at sixteen started to rebel. Desperate to get away from her, he took a job as a pinsetter in a bowling alley, heading there straight from class and working until midnight. His grades sagged; all he cared about at school was playing in the band. To that he added two new passions: the beach and cars. Taking along the Coulters’ son Brad, now his best friend, Baker went drag-racing in his father’s Buick. Since he had no license yet, his parents were furious. But Jack Sheldon was dazzled: He drove like a race-car driver—very fast, and he’d go into places I would never drive.

A devious side of Baker started to show as he became a whiz at stealing gas. He would insert one end of a hose into the tank of some stranger’s car, suck the air out of the other end to create a vacuum, then insert it into his own tank. Sometimes he sniffed the gas—his first experience of getting high. Baker recalled weekends of skin-diving, bodysurfing, and mountain climbing with Brad in Palos Verdes, whose cliffs tower above L.A.’s South Bay. They found a cave and hid there at night, he said, building a fire and sprawling on blankets to a soundtrack of crashing waves.

The boys were having a ball, but Vera panicked. As she watched her son turn into a juvenile delinquent, she agonized over where she might have gone wrong. But Chettie, like his father, craved escape. He found it when he saw a military recruitment poster with Uncle Sam pointing a finger, inviting him to join the army and see the world. Impulsively he decided to do just that.

A heartsick Vera had to agree that there was no other answer. On November 5, 1946, a few weeks before her son reached the legal age of seventeen, she signed him into the army for an eighteen-month stint. On his last night at home, Baker—now a licensed driver—borrowed his father’s car to take a girl named Gloria on a date. At the end of the night, he found a hidden parking spot near her home and beckoned her into the backseat, where they hastily made love. Afterward, he recalled, she dashed out of the car, explaining that she had to wash herself out to avoid getting pregnant.

The encounter was only a trifle more dignified than the one with Barbara, but to Chettie, having sex in a car seemed a lot cooler. Over time, his memory of that date took on a dreamlike glow: Gloria gave him a picture of herself, he said, then kissed him and ran from the car, her golden hair reflecting the moonlight. Just as he discovered how to seduce the camera lens into depicting him in make-believe terms, he learned to glamorize the truth into a fairy tale of intrigue. Baker drove home that night and went to bed, eager to start the life of an independent man.

Lake Wannsee, Berlin, Germany, 1947. Photo by Howard Glitt

2

A few days after his enlistment, Baker stepped off a train at Fort Lewis, a huge army post in Washington state, to start two months of basic training. He and a herd of equally callow-looking youths lined up to have vaccination needles jabbed into their shoulders. As the ache set in, they strapped on seventy-pound backpacks and headed for the forest to practice marching, digging foxholes, and aiming their rifles. Every morning they did a battery of sit-ups and push-ups designed to turn them into rock-solid defenders of their country.

The effort seemed a little pointless. World War II had ended thirteen months earlier, leaving America the preeminent world power, with a seemingly rosy future of financial ease and domestic security. The government vowed to guard that vision from any more Japanese or German attacks. It kept recruiting soldiers, while refining and testing the atomic bomb that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of the war. The image of a gray mushroom cloud of death, shown and reshown in movie newsreels and later on TV, spread a chilling unintended message: that America could accidentally incinerate itself at the touch of a button. Soon the Beat Generation would argue that it was idiotic to plan ahead for a future that might not exist; better to spend each moment as if it were your last. By the late fifties, Chet Baker was living that philosophy more hazardously than almost any Beat.

At Fort Lewis, though, rebellion wasn’t an issue; most of the enlistees were just biding their time while they tried to figure out what to do with their lives. Right after New Year’s Day of 1947, Baker and his barracks mate, Dick Douglas, sat together on a bus to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, where they would embark for Germany. In the dead of winter, hundreds of frightened boys filed up the gangplank of a huge ship. They sailed past the Statue of Liberty, then out to sea. For ten days, said Baker, they lived like packed maggots. Some vomited from seasickness and fear; others tried getting drunk on Aqua Velva aftershave. When the ship docked at the German seaport of Bremerhaven, they fought their way through the snow to a bulletin board that posted each man’s destination. Baker was disappointed: both he and Douglas were slated for Berlin, but while Douglas’s high IQ had earned him an assignment to manage the Western Theater, the center of military operations, Baker—whose recent school grades were mediocre—got the dull job of clerk-typist.

The next morning, a train took them to Berlin, where they beheld the capital of the Third Reich, reduced mostly to debris by the Russians in response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. American and Soviet forces had divided up the city, occupying the apartment buildings left standing. Russian women shuffled through bombed-out areas, picking up bricks and shoveling dirt. Baker never forgot the images of hopelessness and destruction; they made the future seem like a grim place.

He wandered around the Onkel Tom, an unravaged district of northwest Berlin where the American troops were headquartered. His spirits rose when he heard an orchestra playing from inside the ground floor of an apartment building. Opening the door, he found the fifty-six-piece 298th Army Band finishing its afternoon rehearsal. He begged the first sergeant to let him join. The next morning, Baker auditioned with the Martin horn he had brought from America and won the last seat in the trumpet section.

At his first rehearsal, he was handed march arrangements he couldn’t read. He knew certain songs, like When Johnny Comes Marching Home, from his Redondo band days, and bluffed his way through the others. During the initial run-through of a piece, he pretended to play while listening closely to the other trumpeters. The second time he executed the march almost perfectly. He learned the band book so quickly by ear that his interest wandered. There wasn’t much for the orchestra to do, anyway, besides greet the rare visiting dignitary. Some of the musicians spent their free time practicing, but Baker couldn’t see the point of laboring at something he found so easy. Instead, he auditioned for the smaller army dance band, in which he really wanted to play. The conductor and lead alto player, Howard Glitt, was amazed at how bold and strong the seventeen-year-old trumpeter sounded; already he soloed with the confidence of a star. Glitt was sure he had found a sight-reading wonder.

But even the dance band posed no great challenge, and Baker amused himself by hanging out with Dick Douglas, who was fast becoming his hero. Years later, in his autobiographical writings, Baker recalled watching in awe as the cocky Douglas mounted a set of parallel bars, gliding into a perfect handstand. Then Douglas would swagger to his office, fitted out with two German secretaries, a bar, cases of schnapps, a sofa, a film projector, and some French porno films that he used to seduce nurses. My kind of guy, Baker said. One day when a taller, burlier man shoved him aside while leaving the mess hall, Douglas whirled around and knocked him unconscious. Baker was even more impressed to see Douglas, a highranking administrator, get away with running a lucrative black-market business, selling coffee, soap, cigarettes, and other rationed items under the counter. Douglas was casually macho, physically superior, and afraid of no one. For Baker, who had been beaten down by his father and babied by his mother, his buddy’s cool masculinity was enviable. The trumpeter spent hours doing calisthenics in his room to make himself as strong as Douglas.

When summer came, Baker, Douglas, and a couple of their friends took a train to Lake Wannsee, a popular recreation spot at the southwest edge of Berlin, and rented a sailboat. Douglas brought his transistor radio, which picked up crackly broadcasts from the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). Baker heard a new wave of jazz that sounded a lot hipper than Harry James. Its most controversial bandleader was Stan Kenton, an intellectual maestro from the West Coast who viewed himself as the jazz Toscanini. Kenton played his share of silly novelties (His Feet Too Big for De Bed; And the Bull Walked Around, Olay) to appease his record label, Capitol; he had to, no doubt, to offset the weak sales of such pseudo-symphonic pieces as Concerto to End All Concertos. Kenton sat at the piano and pounded out grandiose accompaniment, rising occasionally and waving his long arms to conduct. Pompous as it could seem, his band was full of raw power: trumpets blared in the high register, trombones thundered in the low; the saxophones added a chill that made the music feel like a wintry blast.

Baker’s colleagues in the army dance band were enthralled by Kenton, who signaled big, exciting changes in jazz. Down Beat and Metronome, the top jazz magazines of the day, carried stories about all the Kenton sidemen who were becoming celebrities in their own right: trumpeters Shorty Rogers and Al Porcino, saxophonists Art Pepper and Bob Cooper, trombonist Kai Winding, drummer Shelly Manne, arranger Pete Rugolo. Baker stayed tuned to AFRS to hear other groundbreaking sounds from bandleader Woody Herman, whose arrangers, Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti, were using complex harmonies and tone colors to create an ambitious form of concert jazz.

One musician fascinated and confused Baker above all others: Dizzy Gillespie, a Manhattan-based black trumpeter who was helping trigger what Phil Leshin, a young bassist on the scene, called a complete revolution—socially, personally, certainly musically. Gillespie and a small core of New York players—alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists